The Door Into Shadow

The horses were footsore from being kept at flight-pace on such miserable ground. The grazing was poor, too. After the well-filled mangers of Barachael's stables, it was hardly sur-prising that the horses were in no better mood than their riders. Though no one lived in this barren country, it would be only a matter of time before they ran into Reavers, or Arlene regulars in Cillmod's pay. If not them, there would certainly be Fyrd.
"This is all your fault," Freelorn grumbled at Segnbora as Steelsheen picked her way along beside Blackmane.
Segnbora looked up in surprise from her contemplation of Skadhwe, which lay ready across the saddlebow. "Huh?. . Oh, well, in a way it is. I caused the Battle of Bluepeak, too. Ask me about it sometime."
He glowered at her, and nodded toward Herewiss. "All he did was seal up the Shadow's favorite avenue into the King-doms. What do you do but start making love to It… and then jilt It!"
She started to disagree with Freelorn, and then thought better of it. "So I did." "You're probably in worse trouble with It now than Here-wiss is."
Segnbora frowned at the exaggeration, though it was typi-cal of her liege. "Oh? What do you know about it?"
At that moment Herewiss dropped back to join them, and said, "Considering that he's read the entire royal Arlene li-brary collection on matters of Power, he probably knows more about it than either of us. Face it, "Berend. The Shadow already knew of the threat that I posed, but at Barachael It became aware of you, too. And as they say, your newest hatred is the most interesting. "True," Freelorn added, becoming serious now. "No doubt It believes you're Its deadliest foe at the moment—" "Ha! Some foe …" she said, thinking of her still-unfocused Fire.
The wreaking she had performed with Herewiss had been successful, but now she was almost sorry she had agreed to participate. Ever since, she had not been able to stop brood-ing about her Fire. Over and over again, Hasai's words had run through her mind: Your fear cripples you. You must give it up,
Recognizing an old hurt about which they could do noth-ing, Herewiss and Freelorn fell silent.
Annoyed both at herself and at them, Segnbora took the lead for a while, riding apart and letting the quiet conversa-tion of the others fade beneath her awareness of the sur-rounding country. Skadhwe's reassuring blackness soaked up light at her saddlebow. Its weightlessness, at first unsettling, had become second nature. It was very useful in a fight… And certainly no other sword was all edge and no flat. Likewise, no other sword would, cut anything but, the hand of its mis-tress, as Freelorn had discovered while handling it one morn-ing— Skadhwe seemed not to care for being used by anyone else'. It was delicate, but very definite, about drawing Lorn's blood. Of her, it had demanded nothing so far, and Segnbora thought of Efmaer's words with unease, wondering when the weird would take hold.
Unease seemed to have overtaken everybody these days. No longer were they simply fugitives on the run from Gill-mod's mercenaries; the Shadow was after them now, too, and the knowledge that their souls were in peril had them all on edge.
Segnbora could feel the Shadow working on them even now, driving the group apart, subtly sapping its effectiveness. Even Herewiss was short of conversation these days. He had drawn closer to Lorn, pulling away from the others. As for Freelorn, although every step toward Bluepeak brought the reality of his true-dream closer, he had a haunted look. His followers turned to him for answers, but as often as not came away with a strong sense of his inner distress. At this rate, she thought morosely, they'd never make it to their rendezvous with the Darthenes, at the place where they were massing to take the Shadow's attack.
The afternoon dragged the Sun down to eye level and turned the western horizon into a blinding nuisance. (Sdaha,) Hasai said from way down, (we smell water.) (You've been quiet today. Where?) (West and south. A league as the Dragon flies.) She nodded and thumped Steelsheen's sides, bringing her about in order to inform Herewiss of a place to camp. Hasai had been quiet much of the time since Barachael — a sentient silence with satisfaction at its bottom. . and something else she couldn't quite underhear. (You're finally becoming properly sdahaih,) he had said one evening as she drifted off'toward, sleep. (Anything can happen now.) There had been an ominous overtone to his musing. (What do you see, mdaha?) she had asked sleepily.
But he and the mdtihei had turned their attention away from her, singing wordless foreboding with strange joy woven through, it. They're crazy, she had thought, and gone to sleep. Dragons were always ambivalent about their foreseeings, as if they couldn't — or wouldn't — decide what was good, or bad.
The camp they found three leagues ahead was in a stony, scrubby canyon: shattered, green-white cliffs above, and dry watercourse below. Scant rains kept alive the brush and sev —
eral little spinneys of warped ash and blackthorn, but nothing else. "Where's the water?" Herewiss said to Segnbora, an-noyed. "There," she said, speaking Hasai's words for him, and gestured at the face of the cliff. Herewiss gave her a look and dismounted from Sunspark. "No rest for the weary," he said, and advanced on the cliff with eyes closed, checking her perception. Then he opened his eyes, picked a spot, and brought Khavrinen around in a roundhouse swing. Splintered stone shot in various direc-tions, trailing Fire. Water followed it, bursting from the rock in a momentary release of pressure and then subsiding to a steady stream down the cliffs face.
They watered and fed the horses while Herewiss stood gazing around with a wary look, as if expecting trouble. Segn-bora went away feeling thoughtful herself, and led Steelsheen to the most distant of the ash spinneys. This place has a bad feeling about it, she thought, and then realized why.
The trees were warped and bent, as if by the wind. But the real cause was something less healthy, a something snarled among the ashes' branches. She threw the reins over Steel-sheen's head so that the mare would stand, and pulled some of the stuff out. The long strands were white and soft as spun silk, though as unbreakably strong as any rope when she pulled it between her hands—
From behind her, Herewiss reached in and pulled down the main mass of the material. As the white stuff came away from the tree, a whole mort of things came tumbling out to thump or clatter to the ground.
"Look at that,"he said conversationally, bending down to poke with Khavrinen at something jutting from the white swathing. "The point-shard of a sword. Darthene Master-forge steel, see, Lorn? Look at the lines in the metal."
"It takes a lot to break a sword like that," Freelorn said from beside his loved, but sounding nowhere near as com-posed.
Why now? Why now! Segnbora thought, as Herewiss bent to pick something else out of the whiteness. He came up holding a piece of pale wood,
badly warped: It was smoothly rounded
at one end, broken off jaggedly at the other. "A Rod," Here-wiss said. "Or it used to be."
Dritt and Moris had come up and were staring nervously at this spectacle. "I thought the only thing that could break a Rod was the Rodmistress's death." Moris said.
Without looking up, Herewiss nodded. He used Khav-rinen's point to turn over other oddments tangled in the haphazard white weave: bits of broken jewelry, tatters of what might have been brocade. A bone from a human forearm poked out of the mass, ivory-yellow and scored by tooth-marks. It had been cracked for the marrow, and sucked clean.
"Mare's nest," Herewiss sad, turning to the others and glancing at them one after another. "And recent. We're prob-ably right at the heart of her territory." "Then this is no place for us," Freelorn said. He turned to go take the hobbles off Blackmane, but Herewiss didn't follow him. Freelorn looked back over his shoulder, confused.
"Lorn, it's sunset," Herewiss said. "We'd never make it past her boundaries before nightfall without giving away our position to the Shadow with our noise."
Freelorn stared at Herewiss as if he had taken leave of his senses. "Loved, that's a busted Rod there! Fire obviously doesn't do much good against a nightmare!"
"There are other defenses," Herewiss said absently. It was as if he were reading about the problem from a book rather than seeing it in front of him. He looked up at Segnbora. "How about it?"